


dustworld

by ecrivainescence (hellalugosisdead)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: College AU, F/M, i really hope this makes sense to people who are not me, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 15:58:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9131401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellalugosisdead/pseuds/ecrivainescence
Summary: In a different world, one in some ways a little kinder and in some ways crueler, Shiro thinks he and the Altean exchange student can't possibly understand each other. But everybody, has to face a new, uncertain world at some point, regardless of their native planet. For starrycove!





	

**Author's Note:**

> for starrycove. hope your christmas was spectacular.
> 
> oooooooh dear. here we go.  
> so...i worked for a really long time on this story. like a REALLY long time. months. i had all these pieces and couldn't quite figure out how they went together. so the literal night before the due date, which is to say about 5 hours ago, the darn thing decided to rewrite itself. so i had to do a loooooot of reconstruction, and i think i like it okay! however, i am quite sleepy, and i am crossing my fingers that i have written words in an order that makes sense! alas, my writing process usually includes about six months of the thing just sitting somewhere while i forget about it, and i don't have the time budget for that here.
> 
> i hope you enjoy! 
> 
> if you want to get a sense of the ~sonic vibe~, listen to marche slav by kaki king, and maybe hallelujah by brandi carlile. not that those two go together, particularly. and blood, sweat, and tears by BTS. that one has literally nothing to do with this story. it's just stuck in my head.

No corner of the campus is safe from the news of the exchange student. But while interest is universal, individual opinions vary.

“I mean,” says Matt, stabbing into his noodle bowl with unnecessary aggression, “who even wants to visit this wretched planet? It’s dying.”

Shiro shrugs, unsure of his position on the wretchedness of the Earth, unsure of how he feels about interplanetary exchange students. Just like he’s unsure of everything else in his thus-far short, indecisive life.

“Just look at this place,” Matt says, gesturing with a chopstick to the world outside the glass front of the greasy little shop. “It even looks dead.” And he isn’t wrong – the ground outside is hard-baked and cracked under the sun, the air smoggy. But at least it isn’t Missouri. 

Shiro is fresh from a childhood made of his bicycle rides over broken sidewalks, blasting holo-rock through his earbuds. The skies he remembers were always filled with clouds, but never rain. Just dust, just grit. Grit that remained on your teeth after you drank your rehydrated milk. Grit that made its way into bread dough. Grit that found its way past the wet rags people stuffed into the cracks of doors and windows, forming fine brownish piles on the sills. 

It isn’t fair to expect Matt to understand this. His father is a scientist. His family lives in the city, where the dust storms are rarer, and where you can still occasionally get the kind of imitation chocolate that sort of tastes like the real thing.

Has he ever tasted the real thing? He can’t remember. 

//

The first time they meet, they argue. 

They meet at a luncheon thrown in celebration of her arrival. Intergalactic Affairs Week.  
Here he is, swigging a truly pitiful attempt at fruit punch from a mug. There are no plastic cups. There haven’t been plastic cups for years, except the ones forgotten in the backs of people’s cabinets. Lots of things survive in the backs of people’s cabinets, but nowhere else.

What catches his eye initially is not actually the princess, but some hothouse-grown strawberries that look like they might not even be rehydrated. 

More importantly, they’re covered in what looks suspiciously like real chocolate, not the overly shiny fake stuff everyone is used to now. But that’s next to impossible, he reminds himself. 

Of course, it’s not like he’d be able to tell the real from the fake, but nonetheless, he nearly shivers at the taste – the dark sweetness, and then the sort of sparkly fruity tang that follows. He lines his pocket with a napkin and slips in one, two, three…eight strawberries. And when he looks up he jumps, because there she is, grinning conspiratorially at him.

It’s immediately clear who she is, because humans just don’t grow this shade of icy white hair -- impossibly long, bound up into a thick braid and wound around her head. Even the orange Garrison uniform can’t make her plain. Something about her is a little looser, a little less afraid to take up space than most Earth people – she takes no trouble to squeeze her broad shoulders and hips into the smallest possible space. It makes her seem…larger than life.

He is standing in a circle that includes her, several other professors, and a few other students. Mostly he’s just been nodding at what seem like the right moments and staring at the dead flies caught in the fluorescent lights overhead. 

The others are talking about colonizing planets. Not even the nice ones. Not even inhabited ones. Just icy hells barely inside the frost lines of their respective stars, some hot sandy ones. None of the upscale ones with lots of volcanoes, or methane lakes, or ice cores. 

“They’re finally thinking they may be able to establish a settlement somewhere on the outskirts of the 2k2 system,” says his astronomy professor, an ancient man who appears to be made of wrinkled parchment, blinking out from Coke bottle glasses (an antiquated phrase, since no one remembers exactly what Coke was anymore).

“Really?” He tries and fails not to look too excited. 

“An area of personal interest for you, Shiro?” 

Shiro ignores the faint disapproval on the others’ faces. “Well,” he says, “yes. I’m very interested in any options we’ve got, since the transition from biofuels doesn’t seem to be going too smoothly.”

The exchange student – Princess Allura – turns her white-fire gaze on him. “How can you be in favor of taking another planet for your own,” she says, this girl he’s never met before five minutes ago, “when you don’t take care of the one you have? What about inhabitants you’re not anticipating? What about your responsibility to this world?” 

It isn’t as if he disagrees, per se. 

But he isn’t quite the speaker he wants to be, so he doesn’t know how to explain that he doesn’t give a fuck about the greater moral implications when his mother has two diseased lungs from breathing in all this dust, all this waste in the air. When all the decisions are made by men who can still buy things like bottled water and real chocolate, and run from the consequences of their decisions as long as they like. When butter is replaced by sour, metallic pats of yellow-green margarine, and powdered milk leaves grit in your teeth, and you can never, ever forget that one day even these things will run out. 

So he just nods in concession. But he knows the hurt is plainer on his face than he wants it to be, because there is still so much to say. 

Later, on the soccer field, Shiro runs through lines of plastic cones and thinks half of the strawberries still stashed in his room, and half of her. Something niggles at him – the feeling that he didn’t voiced his point very well (he didn’t) but also a sort of bitter jealousy. Because when she tires of this planet, she will get to leave it. And he will keep fighting for it until it ends him.

How unfair, he thinks, that he wants so much to have something to fight for, and what fate has given him is something that seems like a lost cause.

//

She’s in his unit, of course. Of course.

She’s the navigator, Matt Holt the engineer, and he the pilot. “I’m used to piloting,” she says cheerily, “but I’m happy to learn a new skill.”

He wants to like her. Kind of. But the best he can muster seems to be quiet courtesy and extremely judicious deployment of speech. This is difficult because sometimes she takes this tone that, no matter how much he knows better, seems to him infantilizing. It grates on his nerves. 

Maybe that’s why he starts something like a fight. 

Matt, unlike Shiro, is eager to know everything about Altea. They’re on a fifteen-minute lunch break between simulation runs, shoveling cold pasta salad into their mouths as fast as they can. Matt talks with his mouth full. 

“What about the cryopods? Are the cryopods real?” Matt asks, chin in his hands, oblivious to the mild irritation communicated by Allura’s furrowed brow. 

“Cryopod?” Shiro tries to remain nonchalant, but he feels like a predator who’s smelled blood. “I thought those were just rumors. Ideas cooked up by overexcited Earth kids.”

She swallows a huge bite of pasta salad. “No,” she chuckles, looking a little surprised at his sudden willingness to speak. “No, they’re very real. We use them for most injuries.”

“And can they…” his mouth is dry. His blood heats, pounds in his ears. “Can they do everything they say? Can they even heal sickness? Like pneumonia, or measles or something?”

“I suppose so,” she says.

“What about terminal cancer?”

“Yeesh, Shiro,” Matt says, popping another bowtie noodle into his mouth. “Way to get dire.”

Her nose quirks in thought. “Hmm. Well…I’ve never really thought about it. But yes, I think they can.”

He doesn’t hear Matt making excuses for him, doesn’t hear the din of the cafeteria, didn’t hear the sloshing in the dishwasher room or the chatter in the halls when he slams his tray down and leaves that room. The air suddenly feels thick, heavy, cumbersome. If he doesn’t leave he’s going to break a window and climb out, or cry. He’s uncertain which would be worse.

He doesn’t think about where he’s going until he’s already slammed the exit door behind him, only half-remembering that it’s going to lock and he won’t be able to get back in. 

He doesn’t care, doesn’t care, doesn’t fucking care. His mother’s voice on the telephone is bouncing around inside his skull. Terminal, terminal, terminal.

Out here, the air of the Nevada desert is dry and hot. With the brick of the building at his back, from this side there is nothing in the distance but purple mesas, rock outcroppings, scorched earth. A slice of blue sky so sharp it makes his mouth water. It’s easy to forget that the rest of the world is dwindling away to nothing, the ground is disintegrating beneath his feet, when right here in front of him everything remains so quiet and constant. 

Of course, there’s never been much of anything here to begin with.

//

The door clicks, and she’s there beside him, arms crossed over her chest, indignant.  
“Save it,” he says, just as she opens her mouth. She shuts it, shakes her head, as if flinging water from her ears. 

“I don’t understand,” she says. “I don’t understand why you hate me so much.”

“I don’t…” the words became garbled behind his lips, all of them fighting to get out at once. He rakes his hands through his hair. “I don’t hate you, okay? I just…I know it’s not your fault. But you don’t understand. Anything.”

She recoils as if bitten.  
“I grew up never knowing if I’d ever get to see the world be green again,” he says. “Or if I’d ever see an ocean that wasn’t filled with garbage. I had two options: I could either become a well-digger or go to military school. You say we should be better stewards of our planet.” He tries to keep the bitterness from seeping into his voice, but it gets harder and harder. “But I didn’t choose to be born on a dying rock ball, pockmarked with mining tunnels and stuff. I just wanted to build a real life for me and my mom. And now…now it’s too late for her. She’s going to die. And now I find out that somewhere out there is a magic sleep box that could have fixed everything for her. It could have made her healthy again. But she still isn’t going to get to see a better world.” He shakes his head. “It’s not your fault.”

He walks the long way back to the front doors, thinking of a million things: the grit rubbing his lungs raw, how he’s definitely going to be late now. 

His mother, hair bound up in a bandana, painting the porch of their shabby little Midwestern house. The way she meticulously coaxed morning glories up the side of the house, at least for a while. The single tomato she once managed to grow, and the way it tasted (“This is what real fruit and veggies are like, love.”). The rattle in her voice when she called him to tell him about the diagnosis.

And the look on Allura’s face. He thought it would be a relief to see the realization in her eyes, to see the whirling rage and confusion and sadness inside him projected onto someone else, to know that he wasn’t alone in feeling it. But her face is cleaving him in two. 

He doesn’t speak to her at all after that, not unless they absolutely have no choice. And the weeks and months pass, and the film between him and the world grows thicker, until words are just jumbled sounds, and his surroundings pass unseen before his eyes. He folds himself into a silent, solitary place.

//

The news comes in January, the final step in the long process of his turning inward. It is, bizarrely, almost a relief. To know that his mother will never again have to fight for her breath, or call helplessly for his father. To know that he can finally, finally break. It’s all over now; even the funeral is of no consequence, since no one has the money to have one anyway. 

He closes the blinds in his room, and when Matt knocks on the door with bowls of soup he says nothing. He sleeps, and sleeps, and his short periods of waking are like dreams. Time ceases to make sense.

Later, when he asks Matt when Allura came to the apartment, Matt will say it was been three days since he’d gone dark. She slips in soundlessly, like a peaceful ghost. “Shiro?” She whispers into the darkness.

He opens his puffy eyes just enough to let her know he’s heard her. 

She kneels beside his bed and opens her mouth like she’s trying to find words, her eyes like holes in the dark. But she chokes on them and stays silent. Instead, she just takes his hand in both of her own and rests her cheek upon it, almost like she’s saying prayers. He wants to tell her to go away like everyone else, but something about her cool skin and her quietness is a balm.

“I just wanted to say,” she breathes, “that I finally understand. And that I am so, so sorry.” She remains there for a moment more, running her thumb along his knuckles, saying nothing.

After a few moments, she rocks back on her heels and gets up to leave, then stops. Shiro is still holding onto her hand.

Gently, ever so gently, he tugs her back. “Don’t go,” he mumbles.

“Okay,” she murmurs. “Okay.”

//

He’s lying on his side in the darkness. The illuminated numbers on the clock tell him it’s well after dark. Fingers are moving, ever so gently, through his hair. A voice is whispering somewhere behind him. 

“I can never go back to Altea,” says the voice, as cool and soothing as the fingers on the back of his neck. “If I went home, I would put the entire planet in danger. More than just the planet.

“My father told me to guard the lions. I’m the key, so I have to stay out of sight. I have to just be a quiet little exchange student on Earth. No one can know why I’m here. And when I leave here I don’t know where I’ll go.”

He wants to respond, but sleep weighs too heavy on him. His mouth won’t move.

“I suppose…that’s why it’s so strange to me that you’d ever want a new planet,” she murmurs. “When I would give anything in the world to have my old one back. To see my parents again. To be able to tell my sisters I love them. Humans are such funny creatures. And you…are such a strange human.” 

She tells stories, half-sung in the darkness. She speaks of a planet with lakes of blue fire, and stars that shine in the daytime. She sings a lullaby to herself, something ancient and spellbinding and in a language he doesn’t know. Even what’s in his own language makes only sporadic sense to his limited understanding, but she speaks with a kind of reverence that makes it stay with him anyway.

Her voice grows drowsy, slow and liquid. He can hear the rustle of her blue windbreaker as she sinks down into sleep. A moment later, a warm weight rests against his back, and he knows that even if he were awake he wouldn’t dare move her. 

His last thought before sleep overtakes him again is of how stupid and selfish he’s been to ever think he had a monopoly on hurt.

//

He sees her many times after that, but the next time that matters, Allura is playing Flip Cup. It’s at one of those stupid off-campus house parties. There isn’t much else to do in the area surrounding the Garrison, so you can always find plenty of kids letting their hair down and getting plastered at these things. 

Matt dragged him here, to what is little more than a shack in the middle of the desert. It’s been two months since his mother’s death, and he feels as if he’s covered in new skin: tender, vulnerable, jumpy. Like his new footing is only half-found.

She’s over by the pool table. A rosy flush blooms under her brown cheeks, and sweaty little silver hairs fall out of her bun, sticking to the back of her neck. She looms over some poor sucker, laughing that big laugh you might not have realized could come out of her until you hear it. It’s robust. It’s loud. Alteans could be kind of commanding, Shiro thinks – or at least the one Altean he knows can -- because their body language is apparently different. Kind of hard to read sometimes.

She somehow makes tipsy look regal, even as she sloshes cheap beer around in a red Solo cup. She wears ripped-up jeans and a tight white t-shirt with a flannel tied around her waist, and sneakers, just like any old American college girl. Like she’s stepped into the role for a night or two, and is really bringing down the house with her performance. 

“Shiro!” she says, noticing him, turning and throwing an arm around his neck just like they’re old chums. “How aaare you? Are you having a lovely tiiime?”

“I’m okay, I think, but I’m wondering about you.”

“Oh, that’s silly! Don’t be worried about me, I’m perfect.”

“Are you now.”

“Of course!”

“Can I ask you a question?” He looks down, bemused, into her sparkling eyes, and locks an arm around her waist to keep her from swaying right to the floor. He expects her to immediately pull herself out of his grip, but she doesn’t.

“Anytime.” 

“Do Alteans even drink alcohol?”

“Oh,” she says, raising her sloshy Solo cup. “Well, no. But this – this is just part of being involved. Living the experience. Even if…” She frowns at the liquid inside. It's pale brown. An indecisive brown. Kind of pitiful. “Even if it’s not particularly high quality. Or tasty, for that matter. But I…I like feeling light. Do you know, Shiro?”

He isn’t a fan of alcohol. Doesn’t like to lose control over his limbs or his decisions. But the way her ramrod-straight shoulders are unlocked, he wonders if there isn’t something to the age-old tendency of humans to drink really old plant liquid and just forget for a little bit. Loosen up.

Of course, this doesn’t make the cheap beer appealing or anything. It just means that as he looks down at the woman who has somehow wound herself up in his arms – but not that far down, because Allura is like six feet tall – he realizes he’s kind of thinking about letting her stay there, instead of listening to the panicked, incoherent screaming in his head.

“Shiro,” she says, tugging on his sleeve. “Shiroooooo. I need some fresh air.”

He laughs a little because there is no fresh air here. Not indoors, not outdoors. But at least the early spring air outside has a little chill tonight, so he supports her on the way to the door, and out onto the little cement pad that passes for a patio. There are dark green plastic chairs situated around a filthy little white table, and a lone ember smolders in an ashtray. Everyone’s lungs are going to shit anyway, say some people, so why not smoke? Personally, though, Shiro finds the smell fairly vile.

“You can see Orion,” she says, and points to the belt of three stars adorning the hero’s waist. 

“I owe you an apology,” he says.

“See the nebula?” she says, shifting her finger to somewhere on Orion’s right leg. Maybe she knows the direction of her own beloved Altea, another planet fading, like Earth, but in a different way.

“I’ve been very stupid,” he says. “And I promise to tell you this again at a more appropriate time, but…I can’t wait. I’m sorry I was such a terrible teammate. I’m sorry I froze you out. And most of all,” he says, picking a dandelion out of the concrete and brushing its soft white fluff, “I’m sorry I was only concerned with my own bullshit. I guess I got used to just thinking about myself.” He watches the seeds float away on the hint of a dusty evening breeze. “I got pretty accustomed to being alone, I think.”

“Shiro,” she says, rising up shakily from the patio chair to come and throw her arms around his neck. She plants a sweet dry kiss on his chin. “Silly. You aren’t alone.”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy New Year, Mary!


End file.
